WASSY

Wassy is a small town on the river Blaise in the eastern part of Champagne, not much bigger today than it was in the mid-16th century. At the time the walled city and its surrounding land were part of the French royal demesne. In 1562, the usufruct (the right to the profits) of this estate had been given to Mary, Queen of Scots as part of her jointure as widow of the recently deceased French King Francis II, and the rights were being managed on her behalf by her uncle Francis, Duke of Guise.

On Sunday 1 March 1562 Wassy was the scene of a massacre. The numbers were relatively small, some 50 Protestants killed and a further 200 wounded, but it shocked the whole of Europe. In terms of public opinion, Wassy was the Srebrenica of the age. Polemics for or against it were written in French, German, Dutch, English and Latin; and the illiterate were informed through widely circulated woodcuts. It became the opening drama in a series of conflicts, the French Wars of Religion, that would last for thirty six years, cause widespread destruction and cruelty, and tear France in half.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, but it is unlikely that it was premeditated. The Duke of Guise was an experienced and successful soldier, who was passing through Wassy with a band of armed retainers on his way to Paris. If he had really meant to kill all the Protestants, who at the time were holding a religious service in a barn within the town, then it is unlikely that anybody would have survived. However, in the febrile religious tension of the time, this was glossed over. Protestants were terrified by the massacre, and took to pre-emptive strikes against their actual or perceived enemies. Reprisals and assassinations became the norm. Indeed, within a year, Guise himself was dead, the victim of an assassin's bullet.    

Wassy holds lessons for us today. Although religious issues were hugely important to just about everybody in this period, they were not the only issue; there were Protestants loyal to the Catholic king, and there were humanist Catholics (notably Guise's brother and head of the French church, the Cardinal of Lorraine), who recognised that the established church needed to be reformed. However, as the violence escalated in the wake of the massacre, those in the middle got squeezed. Much against their temperament, the Guise family ended up as the champions of the ultra-Catholic party in France, and it was the Cardinal who pushed through the final hardline provisions of the Council of Trent that fossilised Catholicism for almost 300 years.

Secondly, despite the shedding of large amounts of blood, neither side could win, there were simply too many of the other persuasion on the other side. It took a long time for this to sink in, before the Edict of Nantes, granting religious freedom to the Huguenot Protestants, was enacted in 1598 by King Henry IV, himself a former Protestant. But not before most of the leading protaganists on both sides had been murdered or killed in battle.

Thirdly, the conflicts resulted in a breakdown in moral values. If assassination of one's religious opponents could be portrayed as fulfilling divine will, what was likely to happen to lesser courtesies?

Today's tensions are more between religions than within them; between Muslim and Christian, or Hindu and Muslim. Those involved would do well to look at Wassy, and ponder its consequences.

Walter Blotscher